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The beginning of Pathport

If you think that I woke up on a sunny morning with the Pathport idea, don’t.
If you believe it’s all about glamorous entrepreneurship under the palm trees, don’t. It’s just my Instagram.
But, if you guess it’s an unexpected, non-linear journey, do.
If you think bringing to life this crazy idea happened to be the most enriching years of my life. Do.
And if you too, feel both fear and great intuition. But fear, but intuition. Go.

Life changes in a moment.

At the age of 30 I was supposed to “have it all”, ticking all the social cases of great-head-of-digital-job, perfect-business-school-diploma, nice-boyfriend and charming-Parisian-flat. So yes, I was pretty confident when I walked into the LVMH building for an interview where I had a great chance to get an awesome job, if I played it as usual.
Things did not exactly happened as planned. After reading my resume, my interviewer removed the piece of paper, stared at me from across his desk, and asked: “That looks really great, but who is Laurence Foucher?”. And I remained silent in his huge office avenue Montaigne. Because I did not know the true answer to that question.
I didn’t get the job, but this interview was the wake up call I needed to press pause and start listening to my guts. And my guts were telling me that I needed a major change. This super simple question marked the moment I collapsed. And it was the first day of a long and bumpy ride, but also of everything interesting that’s happened to me since then.

Inception

The Pathport peregrination really started as I was sunbathing in Miami at my friend’s pool – not during a silent retreat in India, even though that would sound so much better. I was in my happy place and I was doing nothing, which I believe is the best thing to do when in need of inspiration. I must say Miami is the perfect example of a destination you would not consider traveling to on guidebooks paper, nor in this particular case based on Instagram search. And it was not just Miami, every time I traveled I was facing the same problem: looking to be inspired but facing too much info to sort through. Oddly enough in my daily life though my Instagram feed gave me recurring cases of wanderlust.
The year following that day at the pool, I watched +40 hours of youtube videos from The Family (a French start-up incubator), quit my job at Danone, teamed up with two different developers and worked on two different app ideas that never saw the light of an App Store. These have been the toughest, yet most enriching years of my life. I’ve learnt that if it’s too complicated in your head, it’s never going to happen.

The Pathport bet

Pathport was born out of this observation that Instagram has changed the way people travel, and the frustration that traditional travel guides have not adapted at all. I mean: 300 pages, no (or poor) visuals and thousands of tips that are supposed to accommodate every tourist profile.
Instagram has introduced a powerful new stage in the travel cycle: “le voyage avant le voyage” (“travel before travel”). Inspiration to travel has become mainstream and our conviction is that the next travel guide is a story.
We’ve contacted the people who inspire us to travel on Instagram and they picked up on the idea faster than I thought. The truth is all of them identified with the problem and were tired of spending hours on Instagram themselves looking for the cool spots! And here we are today: photographers, designers, moms, artists, entrepreneurs… Each one of them has a story to tell about a destination.
With Pathport, the most inspiring Instagramers can now easily turn their most amazing travels into beautiful travel guides.
Discover them here.